Symphonic Genesis

GENESIS

The feeling is dispersed in the face of new beginnings. There is nothing in the music of Juan J. Colomer (Alzira, 1966) that does not speak about it: what he enunciates, what he leaves silent, what he does not completely conceal comes to intervene like the first day between those who listen to it. The luminous passages belong to the frank way in which an idea is shaped and its detours, where it appears without veils, as essential as the darkness that, from time to time, inhabits it. Both are openings to what his work is. We look for ways of access to the present and past, to small pieces of the map, to the abandoned territory or memory, to the contradictions it interrogates. Although this time it is titled “genesis,” Colomer modulates a thought without origin or end, within a perpetually restarted discourse. This is how his invention lives outside. Perhaps in its living references, without dates or places exactly assignable, it retains the sense in which it inscribes, deprived of its ancient power, enigmatic connections, metamorphoses of times. For this reason, although it is about genesis, Colomer’s works become strange to the conditions of their creation, they are beyond the finished and the unfinished, they radiate as far as we like to imagine.

Sensitive to certain impossibilities, always in suspense, Juan J. Colomer fuels our question about what is expressed in the subtitle of A casual walk to Extinction (A casual walk to Extinction, 2023): “The curious case of the urgency that disappeared when humanity “He encountered the greatest challenge of his existence.” This “carefree walk towards extinction” is a call for uncertainty in the face of the climate emergency. Our disproportionate success as a species places us, without knowing it, in a new geological era capable of activating a devastating domino effect: a degree and a half more warming, expanding aridity, extreme weather phenomena, oceans with excess acidity – and plastics -, species threatened, a sea level that rises by millimeters, or five more weeks of summer on this side of the globe. The immobility around stirs up climate Armageddon and that is where Colomer critically confronts a passivity on a planetary scale.

With disturbing inertia, the existential threat occupies this slow and relaxed march that drags us: “despite some episodes of greater drama, on the whole it maintains a carefree air that contrasts with the imminence of the environmental challenge.” It may be a preventive attack, but Juan J. Colomer agrees with the observer’s impression of a kind of scorched earth tactic. That is why he points to the “apparent lightness” to surround it with an “ominous atmosphere, an underlying fatalism, as if the end of days were going to happen gently.” Without much fuss, this impossible journey de-dramatizes the evidence of failure “as if the habitability of the planet were something secondary to worry about in our free time, without the need to change our habits or destabilize the markets.” Signs of degradation that alternate with lavish summits, days that apparently changed everything and changed nothing. In the midst of the collapse, insufficient strategies for survival emerge. The roughness of the journey matters little, between departure and arrival, the white fissure of the flute or harp announces to us the only possible adventure: “our inability to put aside immediate interests for the sake of more ambitious and necessary common goals.” to be able to, at least, alleviate some of the devastating consequences that we are already beginning to suffer.”

In a frighteningly sane world, it is not enough to be wandering among (eco)anxieties, nor to quote that phrase that Einstein never said, nor wrote, to refer to madness. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is the stubbornness that prevails in Escaping Insanity (Escaping the madness, 2021). Juan J. Colomer articulates a theme that he will continually repeat “with its essence unaltered, but with its changing circumstances in each successive repetition.” This call for temporally extended periods welcomes thematic and formal concerns: separating and recomposing is the modeled breath of Juan J. Colomer. The constant revision creates a precise network of materials that, at times, is reinforced in the foreground or camouflaged among the orchestral textures, “passing through different sections and contexts until reaching the end, where the cycle is broken, giving rise to a sensation of liberation.” The minimal performance, just an invitation to wonder in the opening string section, confronts us with the alarming possibility of “making the same trip every day or calling the same person several times at the same time and getting a different experience each time.”

Sometimes the conversation can be drowned out by passing sirens, the other person can get angry, happy, indifferent and so can you. The repetition of the same fact can generate boredom in successive repetitions, or create anxiety, frustration, satisfaction, etc., and that same change in our attitude not only differentiates it from previous instances, but also has the power to alter the result. of that same action.” Escaping Insanity is closing your eyes to see yourself in the well-known shadow of what is known, also in the tedious realm of memory that repeated hours bring, that climate of unactuality, of lost conversations, of smells without surprise that the senses reject, what has already been experienced. and dusty, in the air or in memory.

Sorolla also spoke about madness to his wife, Clotilde, when mentioning the “vibration of light” of the Mediterranean. Equally constant is the evocation of that same light as an intrabiographical extension for Juan J. Colomer. He had dedicated his first ballet to Sorolla (2013) and, beyond seeing with his own eyes that light that so many painters tried to capture, he opened his own, with the Mediterranean in the light, to the shine of California, to the immensity of the Pacific Ocean from the cliffs of Dana Point. He assures that there “the soft Mediterranean light and the vastness of the American landscape coexist in perfect symbiosis.” Colomer explores this “organic aspect” in Symphonic Genesis (2012), a score that celebrates the birth of the Dana Point Symphony Orchestra. Without pause, each of its four sections describe, in a continuous flow, subjective stages of its creation process: I. The germ, II. The creation, III. Rejoicing and IV. Majestic.

Carmen Noheda